Author 




Title . 



Imprint 



The Gaining of Men ; 



The Law of Adaptation to Environment in Missionary 

Enterprise. 



ANNUAL SERMON 



BEFORE THE 



American Board of Commissioners for Form Missions 



DELIVERED TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 10, 1893 



AT WORCESTER, MASS. 



BY THE 



REV. ALBERT J. LYMAN, D.D. 



PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 

I SOMERSET STREET, BOSTON 



The Gaining of Men 



The Law of Adaptation to Environment in Missionary 

Enterprise. 



ANNUAL SERMON 



BEFORE THE 



ra o 



I ■ T i I 



or foreign 



DELIVERED TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 10, 1893 



AT WORCESTER, MASS. 



BY THE 



REV. ALBERT J. LYMAN, D.D. 



PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 

I SOMERSET STREET, BOSTON 



BEACON PRESS : 
THOMAS TODD, PRINTER, 
7-A BEACON ST., BOSTON. 



The Gaining of Men; 

OR, 

THE LAW OF ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT IN MISSIONARY 
ENTERPRISE. 



I venture to ask your attention, Christian fathers and 
brethren, to the singular, fivefold repetition of four words 
by the Apostle Paul within the compass of a single short 
paragraph in the ninth chapter of ist Corinthians. It is, I 
believe, the most marked instance of such reiterated em- 
phasis in all Paul's writings, certainly in those which are of 
unquestioned authenticity. 

The words are, "That I might gain," "That I might 
gain!' A sixth time, even, the refrain is repeated in the 
same connection, with only a slight change, " That I might 
by all means save." The entire passage reads as follows : 

i Cor. ix: 19-23 — 19. For though I be free from all 
men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain 
the more. 

20. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might 
gain the Jews ; to them that are under law, as under the law, 
(" not being myself under the law," as the Revised Version 
adds) that 1 7night gain them that are under the law. 

21. To them that are without law, as without law (being 
not without law to God, but Under law to Christ) that I might 
gain them that are without law. 

22. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain 
the weak : I am made all things to all men that I might by all 
means save some. 

23. And this I do for the gospel's sake. 

It appears that the autobiography of the Apostle Paul — 
for the personal allusions in his letters, while fragmentary, 
surely make up the most vivid autobiography in the Bible — 



4 



THE GAINING OF MEN, 



presents no other passage so clear in its statement of Paul's 
own view of his missionary errand, and especially of the 
relations which, in pursuit of it, he sustains toward his 
environment. 

It embodies what has been called Saint Paul's doctrine of 
"accommodation" to environment — a doctrine, however, so 
liable to misconception that one half-hesitates to read the 
passage as our text tonight, lest he should seem to lower 
the tone of a great occasion like this by some note of undue 
concession or even compromise of principle ; for adaptation 
to environment, which has come to be a great phrase in our 
era, has sometimes involved a kind of surrender to environ- 
ment. In such a time as our own, an arena splendid and 
novel, full of new and peremptory challenges and demands, 
we easily forget the end in our attention to the means in 
conducting the work of great Christian enterprises. The 
popular cry is, " Adapt yourselves to the times;" "Adjust 
yourselves to your environment; " " Change your methods ; " 
" Be all things to all men ! " and the all-absorbing question 
becomes this one of adjustment. How to meet the intellec- 
tual movement of the time, for example, with its keen and 
fresh scrutiny of our foundations of faith ; or the democratic 
movement of our time, with what Emerson calls its "pitiless 
publicity " and its insistence upon popular representation 
as the basis of administrative or corporate action ; or the 
business movement of our time, with its practical air, its 
swift changes, and its impatience of traditional technique. 
But this inevitable anxiety about method often dulls our 
attention to the spiritual end which is sought. In the 
field of missionary enterprise the supreme and constant 
errand — that of the spiritual rescue of men and nations — 
easily fades from sight in our enforced and eager attention 
to the combinations of agency by which, in a tremendous 
and bewildering age, missionary enterprise is to be ad- 
vanced. But worse than this, the argument for change in 
method, in response to changed environment, is pressed 
too far and carried to a most fallacious extreme. The curve 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



5 



of false reasoning runs like this : We must suit ourselves to 
the age, it is said ; we must give the people what they will 
understand — and accept. So enters the deflecting fallacy 
under cover of the innocent looking conjunction, and the 
false argument runs on to say — we must preach a nine- 
teenth-century gospel and meet the times with what the 
times demand. 

Thus, before we know it, the spirit of concession as to 
method has invaded the texture of the message itself. The 
heroic strain of fidelity to the truth is relaxed. The old 
martial gleam fades in the eye of the missionary. Christian 
daring is succeeded by Christian diplomacy, and the mission- 
ary spirit permits itself to be half conquered by the world in 
order to gain access to the world. 

This sidelong sag toward surrender of vital principle 
makes true men question any doctrine of so-called " accom- 
modation " to the times. But, on the other hand, here in 
the text is a maxim of the great model missionary, stated 
with all the force of his eloquence and personal testimony, 
involving a principle of response to environment which, 
evidently, he regarded as vital to his success. 

What then is this principle of Christian " accommodation," 
or, as we had better say, of adaptation to environment in the 
work of missions ? What are the limitations of its applica- 
tion ? What philosophy of the Christian life lies back of 
it, and how does it apply to the new forces which are re- 
modeling the present epoch ? These, honored brethren, are 
questions which have seemed to me vital enough and per- 
emptory enough to be not wholly inopportune for our con- 
sideration tonight. 

For the imperfect preparation I have been able to make 
for their presentation I must crave at your hands a special 
indulgence. The most shattering blow that can fall on a 
man fell upon me just as the summer was opening. Death 
struck upon the dear wife who for twenty-three years had 
walked by my side. I have no child, and the lonely fight 
this past summer among the Scottish Highlands to regain 



6 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



enough of steadiness to meet this duty, to which your more 
than kind invitation had summoned me, has left scant leisure 
for that careful study and finished statement which such a 
theme demands and which a presence such as this preemi- 
nently calls for. But what I have, I give. Our subject, 
then, is this : 

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT IN 
ITS RELATION TO MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE AT THE PRES- 
ENT TIME. 

Of course this theme is too large for a single sermon, 
but let us try, if possible, to discover the single, central prin- 
ciple of St. Paul's teaching upon the subject in the passage 
before us. 

First. We need not delay upon any restatement of the 
general truth — now the axiom of physics, and accepted also 
in the critical study of intellectual and moral forces by most 
modern students — that the progress of life depends, or at 
least very largely depends, upon this adaptation to environ- 
ment. 

Second. Nor need we linger long upon the further very 
remarkable fact that Christianity, far more thoroughly than 
any other of the great religions, approves this law. 

Adaptability to environment, without loss of essential 
quality, is a principle which lies at the marrow of the philos- 
ophy of the gospel, and is clearly illustrated in the New Tes- 
tament. It appears, for example, in the profoundest parables 
of Jesus concerning the kingdom of God, such as those of 
the "leaven" and of the "mustard-seed." It appears in such 
later revelations as Saint Peter's vision at Joppa and address 
to Cornelius. It appears in the immense yet facile change 
of policy toward the Gentiles accomplished at the first 
Church Council at Jerusalem. It shines along the whole 
career of Paul, and has reappeared at every vital epoch in 
the Church's history — a certain divine breadth and ease of 
adjustment to external conditions, wholly unknown in other 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



7 



religions, which yet impairs not one whit the persistence of 
essential idea and spirit. 

Third. Let me, however, call your more careful attention 
to a third point, viz., that this unique, double mark of per- 
sistence in radical ideal, combined with flexibility of method, 
has always been supremely manifest in missionary enterprise. 
The noblest Christian missions always exhibit this supreme 
fidelity and facility side by side. 

Ulifas, in his boat on the Danube, carrying the gospel to 
the Goths in the fourth century ; Bishop Claudius, of Turin, 
"the Protestant of the ninth century," as he has been called, 
planting the cross amid the snows in the upper valleys of 
Piedmont ; Eliot, two hundred and fifty years ago, in the Mas- 
sachusetts forests with his Indians ; Mackay, of Uganda, in 
our own time, gentle, brilliant, and brave, cutting his own 
printing types in the African forest and tolerated by the sav- 
age Mwanga only because he was such a master at the forge 
— all are embodiments of the finished and beautiful power of 
this double Christian principle, that of variety of method with 
identity of spirit. And there is reason in this ; for the mis- 
sionary, more than any other minister, stands out on the crit- 
ical and perilous edge where the gospel meets the heathen 
world. He, therefore, more than any other man, must employ 
the Christian art of conciliation without compromise. His 
task is urgent ; his time short ; his errand is to save ; and 
with a swift and nimble skill, the secret of which is in the 
very heart of the Christian genius, he matches his method 
to the man, yet without sinking a consonant or blurring a 
vowel in the divine message he is sent to deliver. 

Fourth. But missions also supremely illustrate a still 
further principle which is, I believe, the real heart of the 
matter — that this wonderful facility of outward adaptation is 
the product as well as the correlative of the inner spiritual 
earnestness. 

Here we come upon the main track of our theme ; and 
the main truth which, if I mistake not, is taught by our 
text, and which I would venture to emphasize tonight, that 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



a reinforcement of the essential missionary spirit, its vital 
enthusiasm, its humane ardor, its Christlike passion to save, 
is the one and the true and the only way in which to secure 
that broad facility in readjustment, that fine adaptation to 
the new conditions, which is now in demand. 

For this breadth and quickness of adaptation to the times, 
whether it relates to organization or to policy, is a vital thing. 
It must spring from an inner source ; it is no matter of out- 
ward manipulation ; it is the outward glow of an inner fire ; 
it is something too fine to be reached, save as the spontane- 
ous resultant of some holy and beautiful passion of the soul. 

It is precisely at this point that we come upon the tre- 
mendous sixfold refrain in this passage from the apostle 
Paul. The passage is often brought forward as the standard 
justification of variety in mere method ; but, if so, it is read 
without the refrain. No more magnificent assertion of the 
supremacy of end over method was ever uttered. All meth- 
ods are adopted, according to Saint Paul, " that he might 
gain" "that he might gain" and only "that he might gain" 
men. What he means by "gain " men is, as he himself adds, 
that he might "save" men. And what he means by "save" 
is, as is evident in all the Pauline writings, the saving men in 
Christ — the setting up of the image of Christ within them. 
That is the heart of the Pauline idea ; it is the glorious 
beauty of a spiritual restoration by the introduction of the 
very power and similitude of the living Christ within men. 
The burning sense of this thrilling and holy end lies back 
of any Pauline "adjustment" in the use of means. And, 
brethren, is not a fresh sense of this supreme end of mis- 
sions what we most of all need today, and in it, do we not 
come to a clear knife-edge beyond which concession to envi- 
ronment or to the spirit of the age must not go, but within 
which adaptation to environment becomes a spontaneous 
product of this aroused earnestness to save ? It is as though 
the apostle felt that in admitting such a flexibility in the use 
of means, he was avowing a principle which would be danger- 
ous in feeble or faithless hands ; so, in this refrain he rivets 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



9 



down, as by repeated hammer-strokes, the sharp rim beyond 
which the flexible is to become the inflexible. It is as though 
we were reading a code of military instructions, but reading 
them in the intervals of a cannon-shot, whose recurrent thun- 
der gives us the sense of the real import of all instructions 
and of the mass and menace of the foe ; or, to take a closer 
analogy, it is as if the captain of a life-boat were announcing 
hurried orders to his crew how to turn here and there and 
handle the boat in the foam ; but all spoken in the boat itself, 
and interpreted by the flash of yonder revolving light on 
the shore, whose gleam shows breaking wreck and drown- 
ing men and all the mournful and terrific urgency of the 
hour. 

Method, according to Saint Paul, waits on errand, and it 
needs no argument to show how this errand to "gain" men 
and nations in Christ fascinates and fires the great apostle. 
This it is which gives him that ingenium perfervidnm, that 
white-hot passion of service, which drove his whole life. All 
the heavens blazed to him at the thought of gaining a man to 
Christ. Human literature contains no picture which quite 
matches this enthusiasm of Paul for his Lord and for savins: 
men in his Lord's name. 

It will not do, therefore, to read this passage in a quiet 
monotone, as though it were a studied schedule of Christian 
diplomacy, with a little evangelical cadence occurring at in- 
tervals. The cadence is the theme. It is the cadence that 
is controlling. Read it again in this view of it : Among 
Jews I am Jewish ; then comes the cannon-shot " that I 
might gain Jews." To legalists, I am as a legalist; "that 
I might gain them that are under the law." To freemen, a 
freeman, "that I might gain " freemen. To the weak, weak, 
"that I might gain" the weak. A servant to all, "that I 
might gain " the more. To every one a comrade, for that is 
what that phrase " all things to all men " really means, "that 
I might by all means save," and only as shall help me to gain 
and save. 

The object limits the method ; the continued identity of 



10 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



the end limits the play of variety in the use of means. The 
great iron bridge over the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, 
the mightiest bridge in the world, is allowed to slide seven 
feet on itself to allow for contraction and expansion. If it 
were rigid it would crush itself under the summer sun or 
pull itself asunder in the winter frost. As free as the swing 
of the tree-bough is the seven-foot slide upon itself of that 
enormous mass of iron ; but it must be all along one line 
and groove, not by the fraction of an inch outside of that. 
So of the free slide of Christian adaptation to environ- 
ment. The majestic and intense idea of gaining the soul 
determines the limits of variation in the way of approaching 
the soul. But we go further. The exact point is here. These 
fine adaptations of method are the sfto7ttaneous products of 
devotion to such an end as this ; for the end is not to gain 
converts but to gain men, to recreate the true glory of the 
soul by bringing Christ into men and informing them with 
his lovely and lofty image. 

Now, an end like this is so enkindling and exalted, so on 
the very ridge of human aspiration and power, that even to 
conceive it gives breadth and play to a man's faculty, and 
wholly to seek it reacts into the utmost spring and readiness 
of resource, like a climb in the hills. Realizing such an 
errand, the missionary approaches men with the supreme 
ease of a fearless friendliness, and a missionary society ar- 
ranges its policy with a gentle largeness in which is the very 
genius of real adaptation, and yet without a hint of surren- 
der of principle. 

Missionary measures and policies, then, are not compro- 
mises, inventions, devices, studies in attitude, so much as 
they are the natural attitudes of the real wrestler, the real 
rescuer. This impulse to save is the thing in Christianity — 
the heart of its heart, like the "inmost purple spirit of light," 
to use Shelley's phrase — and this when felt creates adapta- 
tion as the target attracts the shot. Only kindle that saving 
passion in a man, admit intellect to it, and he cannot help 
adapting himself to the circumstances of the case. The 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



I I 



thing to pray for is not the adaptation but the fire. Facility 
waits on fervor. (Perhaps a lack of this fire is the reason 
why some of our laborious modern "adaptations" are so 
ineffective.) 

And the Christian philosophy which underlies all this is 
that simple yet noble philosophy to which now the minds 
of Christian people in many lands are turning. Christianity 
is a life, a personal and divine life, reproduced in a human 
life ; an incarnation — first, of God in Christ, and then of 
Christ in believing man. 

Now this life of God, reproduced through Christ in man, 
is reproduced in man, i.e., it stands related to what is generic 
and universal in human nature and in man ; and our meth- 
ods become at once easily varied and free when we seek the 
generic and universal. The life of God in the soul of man 
is beneath subsidiary forms of statement on the side of the 
message and of manners on the side of the man. What is 
merely relative, provisional, fugitive, in either direction, in 
the dialect of the message or the manners of the man, the 
missionary knows himself free to deal with as circumstances 
require, else we could not even translate the Scriptures. 
But the heart of the message must reach the heart of the 
man. These remain the same. The missionary stands, then, 
for the identity and brotherhood of man everywhere and for 
the identity of the gospel everywhere. Here is the philo- 
sophical ground for the magnificent and unique combination 
of facility and fidelity which we observe in the best missionary 
service — a feature which is always lost in the mere propa- 
ganda. Loyalty to the Christian faith is never sacrificed. 
It was this very Paul who said he made himself " all things 
to ail men " who also said " God hath made of one blood all 
nations of men," and who also said, " Though we or an angel 
from heaven preach any other doctrine, let him be anath- 
ema." Paul's doctrine of adaptation must be interpreted by 
Paul's own practice ; and as to that practice, there was more 
of constancy in it than of change. Never for a moment did 
that swift and martial life lose its battle-rush, under any cau- 



I 2 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



tion or concession of diplomacy. Always outspoken, firm, 
and valiant, he suppressed nothing of the main truth of his 
message to avoid danger or conflict. The real message must 
reach the real man, and no "adaptation" is admissible which 
for a moment dulls or delays this vivid and vital contact. 

Such, in rough statement, I understand to be Saint Paul's 
principle of adaptation — what we may call the Christian 
law of adaptation in connection with missions. It is an 
adaptation which is both subordinate to a spiritual end and 
is itself the spontaneous product of aroused fidelity to that 
end. 

Now, before seeking, in the closing paragraphs, to apply 
this principle to the question of the great and novel forces 
which are reshaping the conditions of missionary work in 
our day, I venture to burden your patience for a moment by 
way of showing how brilliantly the history of missions con- 
firms the view here presented — that the broadest variety 
and facility in method spring from the intense evangelical 
earnestness of the underlying motive. When the true spir- 
itual end of gaining men for Christ has been lost sight of 
in the zeal of the propagandist or the partisan, then methods 
have become cumbrous and artificial. But the true mis- 
sions, from the time of Saint Paul to the present, have been 
full of a certain supremacy of essentials, a cheerful ardor, a 
vivid and happy sense of Christ and his good news for men, 
a central glow so gracious and humane that awkwardness and 
stiffness of address and policy became impossible. 

You know how it was at the very beginning. Other 
hands caught Saint Paul's falling torch and carried it far and 
wide, for the true "apostolic succession" was the missionary 
succession. The nimble and winged Greek tongue received 
the most precious treasure ever committed to a language — 
the story of the cross. 

Scattered by winds of persecution, which, as we are 
accustomed to say, both winnowed the wheat and sowed it 
through the earth, Christians went everywhere, and the 
name "Christian" became synonymous with "missionary." 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



] 3 



Then ensued that wonderful dissemination of the gospel, 
never paralleled in the history of religions. We see that 
missionary torch, Paul's old torch, flying along the great 
Roman roads, in the wake of armies, on the margin of car- 
avans ; soldiers and sailors pass it from hand to hand. Across 
the African desert, up the windings of the Nile, out along 
the Red Sea to Yemen and India, across Mesopotamia to 
Persia, north into the vast forests of Dacia, over the snowy 
redoubt of the Alps into Gaul, and beyond Gaul, even, to 
where the misty islands of Britain fronted the prophetic 
pulsing of the western sea — everywhere in those early 
centuries went the missionary messenger of the cross, and 
everywhere in his track we find a certain bright charm of 
manner and address which is the spontaneous product of his 
living sense of his wonderful message. 

Irenaeus, writing from the upper Rhone in the second 
century, says : " Though the languages of the world are dis- 
similar, yet the import of the tradition in them all is one 
and the same." "The haunts of the Britons," writes Ter- 
tullian in the third century, " inaccessible to the Roman 
arms, are accessible to Christ." The spirit of Pentecost, 
vital yet varied, like mingled wind and fire, inspired believ- 
ers and ran throughout the world, catching every man's ver- 
nacular, swiftly meeting every local condition, everywhere 
apparently provincial because everywhere so deeply cosmo- 
politan, mobile and facile because human and divine, until 
by the opening of the fourth century ten millions of Chris- 
tians were numbered in the Roman Empire in place of the 
barely half million at the close of the first century. 

In each of the three following centuries, the fourth, fifth, 
and sixth, one missionary achievement of the first class car- 
ries on the same deep lesson — that felicity in the handling 
of missions is the fruit of spiritual earnestness. These three 
superb achievements were the mission of Ulfilas to the Goths, 
in the fourth century ; that of Patrick to Ireland in the fifth 
century ; that of Columba to Scotland, in the sixth century. 

There is no time to speak of them in detail. As varied 



14 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



as the peoples addressed, free and natural yet amazingly 
effective in method, were these missions, in which the facile 
adaptation plainly grew out of the spirit of Christlike love 
for man which possessed these three great missionaries. 
This appears in the letters of Patrick, the missionary to 
Ireland. He was a heroic and fascinating personality. Born 
in Brittany, he was in his youth captured by pirates and car- 
ried to Ireland and used as a slave, finally escaping, then 
returning voluntarily under the irresistible desire to preach 
Christ among the rude barbarians whom he had known as 
a bondman. 

" My friends tried to prevent me," he writes, " saying, ' Why 
does this man rush into danger among the heathen ? ' . . 
But God conquered in me and I withstood them, and I went 
to preach the gospel to the people of Ireland, where I am 
ready to give up my life with joy for Christ's name's sake." 
He established perhaps three hundred churches aud kindled 
a light that illumined all Western Europe for three hundred 
years, giving to Ireland its title of Insula Sanctorum, and 
he accomplished this by what we should call a marvelous 
skill in adaptation. He entered the cabins of the common 
people, adopted their manner of life, met their prejudices, 
winning all by a certain gentleness and even gayety, hitting 
to a nicety the nerve of the Celtic race, and yet moved by 
such an ardor that he says, " In one day I offered a hundred 
prayers and in the night almost as many, and in the moun- 
tains I rose up to pray in the snow, ice, and rain before day- 
break, yet I felt no pain, for the spirit glowed within me." 

Then, in the century still following, we have the intel- 
lectual mission of Columba, perhaps the most marvelous of 
the three. He was an Irishman of the noble blood of Ulster. 
In the spirit of penance for his own fiery temper he came 
from Ireland with twelve followers, and in 563 A.D. established 
a mission to the Picts on the wild and stormy west coast of 
Scotland. The little islet of Iona, where Columba set up 
his school, became the Scottish Patmos, and its beautiful 
cross, the "cross of Iona," became the immortal Christian 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



blossom on that rough coast, telling to this day the story of 
that wonderful mission — a mission heroic, intellectual, evan- 
gelical — training students, translating the Scriptures, send- 
ing out missionaries all over Western Europe, maintaining 
a free and spiritual conception of Christianity, and even 
holding out against the authority of the Vatican for two 
hundred years. 

Now, the thing that shines out in connection with each 
of these three astonishing missions, different entirely as they 
are in time and type, is the very thing we are speaking of 
tonight — an extraordinary breadth and freedom of adaptatio?i 
of method to environment combined with equally marked 
purity and earnestness of evangelical spirit. The inference 
is demonstrative that this spirit itself, the spiritual enthu- 
siasm to save in Christ's name, produced the bold and easy 
play of agency and method, the winning felicities of man- 
ner, the subtle appositeness in meeting circumstances and 
addressing men. 

Then, later on, we have in a sadder story the same truth 
illustrated conversely. There arose the strange menace of 
the crescent in the east ; the Saracen captured the Holy 
Sepulcher, the Moor came to Spain, and Europe passed 
into the din and clang of those iron centuries of the Cru- 
sades. Missionary activity did not cease, but it lost its 
spiritual tone, and also, in the same ratio, its felicity of 
method. We look in vain for the humane sympathy of Pat- 
rick or the intellectual freedom of Columba. Missions be- 
came politico-ecclesiastical. Force and diplomacy became 
the substitutes for the beautiful charm of natural adaptation, 
and accordingly missions relatively failed. 

But the meridian of history changed in Europe. God 
shifted in a night the hinges of his doors. The great 
focus and pivot of affairs was transferred from the eastern 
rim of Europe to the western. In 1492, Boabdil, the last of 
the Moorish monarchs, fled from Spain, and the cross shone 
in the halls of the Alhambra. In that same year the finger 
of God's providence made of the deep a furrow, and pointed 



[6 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



the path before three little boats in which Columbus set 
forth upon the mighty voyage whose issue after four hun- 
dred years this nation celebrates in its Columbian Festival. 
Twenty-five years later Martin Luther nailed his theses to 
the church door in Wittenberg, and the tremendous six- 
teenth century came marching in like an army with ban- 
ners. In the south, the classic Rennaisance ; in the north, 
the German Reformation ; in the west, the Titanic burst 
of the Elizabethan era, and as the result of all a new vol- 
ume opened for the world and for Christ ! Christianity dis- 
covered that the world was round, and for the first time 
wholly took its problem up into its hands. Still, missionary 
activity, while often laborious and heroic, was ecclesiastical 
rather than evangelical in its notion of the end to be at- 
tained. Its methods accordingly were still artificial, and the 
results in the way of permanent spiritual conquest were 
largely barren. The Latin Church at this period sent out 
whole regiments of missionaries — many of them most de- 
voted men — to India and Japan and to the new lands, to 
South America, Mexico, and the Indian tribes of the far 
north, when men like Brebeuf, Rene Menard, and Marquette 
endured incredible hardship. These Roman Catholic brethren, 
also, are of the noble army of martyrs. Japan was claimed 
to be " Christianized." In India Xavier baptized alleged 
converts till his arms sank exhausted in the act of baptizing. 
But these, also, were not altogether spiritual conquests. The 
spirit that governed them was not always a passion to save 
men from sin in Christ's name. It was often a passion to 
multiply adherents to a church — the spirit of the propaganda. 
And accordingly this degeneration of end produced a degen- 
eration of means. These agents of the propaganda " adapted " 
too much. Legitimate concession becomes illegitimate sur- 
render, and these Latin missions of the sixteenth century to 
a large extent failed and fell, ending in Japan in frightful 
tragedy ; in Mexico, and some of the South American States, 
sinking in the swamps of native vices; in India — under 
Robert de Nobili — conceding so much to Brahminic caste 
as to become "more Brahminic than Christian." 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



But a new spirit arose. Early in the eighteenth century 
the little Moravian Church at Herrnhut resolved itself into 
a missionary " committee of the whole." The political and 
ecclesiastical conception of the mission gives way before the 
return of the apostolic and spiritual. The true unit of mission- 
ary enterprise becomes again the saving of a man in Christ. 

In 1789 William Carey landed in India, and the modern 
Protestant mission was born. And since that epoch this 
last one hundred years of Protestant missions is one long, 
splendid demonstration of the same Pauline maxim that facil- 
ity and efficiency of adaptation to environment is the natural 
fruit of the Christian passion to save. 

What magnificent expositions of this principle have been 
seen in the history of this American Board. The most noble 
and daring of them all is, perhaps, the translation of the 
Scriptures into the vernacular of hundreds of peoples ; for 
what is this but the broadest and most fearless " adaptation 
to environment," yet without losing a single note in Paul's 
old cry, "That I might gain," "That I might save." 

No words can do justice to the magnificent splendor of 
this achievement of translation and to its significant bear- 
ing upon the point before us tonight. For it might easily 
be said and plausibly argued that we should lose what is 
characteristic in Christianity in committing its delicate and 
spiritual message to the meager and coarse syllables of a 
savage tongue; that translation, even, is adaptation carried too 
far. For languages reproduce psychologies. The wide gulfs 
that separate whole races run up between their linguistic 
forms, and one might maintain that the very essence of a 
given idea is bound up in a given language and confined 
to that language. 

The French " Dieu " is not quite the Saxon "God." It 
has been a question with our missionaries what Chinese word 
to choose out of nine possible combinations to represent the 
supreme name. Can the sublime Jehovah of the Hebrew 
writings, it might be asked, be made known in Malay, and 
the finished Christ of the Greek Testament be reproduced 



r8 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



in Choctaw ? And what words has the Zulu of South Africa 
into which the mighty logic of the Epistle to the Romans 
can be hammered ? 

Never mind, has been the reply of this American Board, as 
of all the great Protestant societies. The gospel is as univer- 
sal as man. So widely humane is it, so intimately vital to 
all men, that even the variations of a hundred dialects are 
subordinate after all. We dare to fling this gospel out to 
the winds of any century, out to the native handling of any 
people. Christianity can stand universal translation. It 
can be preached in every man's vernacular. It is doubtful 
whether the iron fatalism of the Moslem literature can be 
reproduced in the free energy of Saxon. It is more than 
doubtful whether the mystic subtlety of Buddhism can be 
put into the finished and brilliant precision of the French. 
But Christianity may be preached in Arabic or Hindi as well 
as in French or English. What ampler or bolder testimony 
is possible to the principle under discussion, that the philoso- 
phy of Christianity unites consistent adherence to the cen- 
tral idea with infinite adaptation of form to environment ? 

Surely the deep logic of the past history of the Ameri- 
can Board tends toward a noble and yet safe liberality in 
meeting the fresh environment of new times. 

In the same line of illustration, also, is the immense 
confidence with which the American Board has in these 
later decades more and more intrusted the gospel to native 
pastors, managing their own native churches. Does it not 
seem as though the seal of God's approval has been put 
upon this idea of intrusting the gospel to the native hand- 
ling of the nations ? It is not necessary to denationalize a 
people in order to Christianize them. At first the theory 
was different. The American Board in an early Annual 
Report, for the year 1816, I think, declared the object of 
the mission among the Indians to be "to make them 
English in their language, 1 civilized in their habits, and 
Christian in their religion." 



r The italics are ours. 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



'9 



Now, on the contrary, this Board says to the children of 
Japan : Remain Japanese if you will, but be Christian. You 
do not require to come into the kingdom of heaven via the 
English language alone, or via the local idiosyncrasies of 
Western civilization. You can be your own Oriental selves 
and yet be evangelical Christians. You can realize your best 
national ideals and yet be Christian. The missionary is no 
foe to local patriotism. 

Finally, then, may we not bring this Pauline principle — 
that the finest and broadest adaptation to environment in 
the conduct of missions has its true source in the loving 
earnestness to gain men in Christ — into the great and thrill- 
ing arena of the present hour, and ask how it applies to mis- 
sionary enterprise now, in the midst of our novel and exciting 
conditions of life, and especially in view of four special forces 
of our epoch, which are, perhaps as prominent and positive 
as any. 

For the critical and urgent question which confronts us 
and crowds upon us, is really this : Can our missionary work 
adapt itself, without loss, to this modern environment, and, if 
so, how, and how far ? 

Beneath our special discussions is this real question of 
readjustment at various points to what we call the " spirit 
of our time." What readjustments, if any, are appropriate, 
for example, in view of the spirit of critical inquiry as to 
matters of doctrine ? What readjustments, if any, does the 
democratic and socially representative spirit of our age call 
for ? These are specimens of questions where the light glit- 
ters on the weapon's edge in current debate. My office is 
surely not to enlarge upon these special questions, but to 
voice your deeper and common feeling in referring them all 
to a still more commanding principle, the law, as we have 
tried to trace it, of all adjustment to environment in mission- 
ary enterprise ; that we are first to gain a certain fresh sense 
of our holy and thrilling missionary errand before we are fitly 
prepared even to enter upon these questions of adjustment, 
and that when we are once fairly possessed with our errand 



20 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



in Paul's way and in Christ's name, the "adjustments " will 
already have half accomplished themselves. 

It is along the line of Saint Paul's thrilling, sixfold cry, 
"That I might gain," " That I might gain " that we shall best 
approach the immediate questions of the present hour. 

One can scarcely go amiss in selecting these four among 
the chief new forces of our time : 

First. The spirit of free rational inquiry and criticism. 

Second. The spirit of industrial enterprise by the aid of 
applied science. 

Third. The spirit of representative government under 
forms of a social democracy. 

Fourth. The spirit of humanitarian relief and reform. 

These rapidly closing moments will permit only the brief- 
est glance upon these four tendencies, but we must hold that 
to them, also, our principle applies. They are all within the 
compass of legitimate missionary use and adaptation, but 
such a vast adaptation can only be accomplished through the 
channel of a profoundly quickened and deepened earnestness 
in the work of missions itself. 

I. As to the intellectual and critical movement of the 
age, the attitude of the missionary spirit may be, on the one 
hand, absolutely fearless and friendly, while on the other 
hand it holds this intellectual movement in clear subordina- 
tion to its own still larger spiritual end. For the intellect 
is a part, but only a part, of the spirit. In the great Oriental 
mission fields scientific agnosticism is powerfully affecting 
the native thought, while here at home the new Biblical criti- 
cism has brought upon all classes of religious societies per- 
haps their sharpest strain of difference and debate ; and how 
to adjust the operations of a missionary society to this crit- 
ical tendency is plainly a task of great delicacy and difficulty. 

But the voice of our argument at this point is perfectly 
clear, and in it there is both a liberal and a conservative note. 
On the one hand, and so far as the movement of the time is 
truly intellectual, the missionary sympathizes with it. He 
should meet the intellectual unbeliever with a finer intellec- 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



tualism even than his own, and if he is dead earnest, and live 
earnest too, to gain the whole soul to Christ, he zvill incorpo- 
rate in his work this finer intellectualism. 

Let us never forget that Christianity is intellectual. 
Never a school without a chapel, but never a chapel without 
a school. Christianity is, let us repeat, a life, and a part of 
that life is thought, and there cannot be any real thought 
unless it is free thought. We sometimes say "free intelli- 
gence." Intelligence is not intelligence unless it is free. In 
our time a religion must take thought on board or fail. 
Christianity is the only religion that dares to take thought 
in its integrity on board. Protestantism is the free and spir- 
itual union of unfettered intelligence and fervent faith, with- 
out detriment to either. It is not the invention of the six- 
teenth century. It was born in the first birth of the rational 
soul, and it shone in the finished intuition of Jesus and in 
his boldly doing away with the letter of the ancient code 
while he fulfilled its spirit. 

The Protestant missionary, then, in meeting the free 
thought of the age, simply meets outside of himself that 
which is an integral factor within himself. He is to be at 
home beneath the illumined dome of the twentieth century, 
because he is himself a part of that illumination. 

So much, then, is admitted and gladly urged, that our 
missions have no quarrel with the spirit of rational criticism 
if only it be genuinely rational, that is, unprejudiced and 
devoted to truth. But, on the other hand, the missionary 
spirit insists that all speculation, with which in itself it has 
no quarrel, shall yet be subordinate to the practical errand 
of saving men. 

The missionary has little leisure to examine the mere 
nebulae in the theological skies. He leaves that to his 
brother at home in the seminary. Somebody should count 
threads, but not the man who is running with the life-line. 
The missionary is the ordinary minister, minus a little spec- 
ulation and plus a little urgency. He has his freedom of 
thought certainly, but he is engaged in the imminent wrestle 



22 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



to rescue a man or a nation from moral death, and he wishes 
to think to some practical purpose. The possibilities of the 
unrevealed future, for example, engross his attention as little 
as does the weather of tomorrow the attention of a fireman 
who dashes into a burning house to save a child. The text 
would teach us, I feel sure, that the main missionary motive 
is not drawn from any speculation whatever as to the future. 
That motive is drawn from Christ and from the preciousness 
of man and the possibility of saving him now by bringing the 
image of Christ's manhood into him. Here is the glowing 
heart of the Pauline idea — to save a man now, from his sins, 
in Christ ; to rescue a nation now, from its degradation, in 
Christ. This is the commanding and naming conception. 
The eschatological forecast, prominent as it should be, is 
not the most prominent factor in the consciousness of the 
missionary. 

The missionary spirit insists on the perspective of im- 
mediate service, and in the instant blaze of this great fore- 
ground certain horizon questions lose relative importance. 
And for the very same reason the missionary spirit con- 
demns, not severely, some hesitancy of attitude upon these 
horizon questions. It is gently tolerant of marginal mis- 
givings so long as they do not intrude upon this peremptory 
perspective of immediate service, but not tolerant of them 
when they do thus intrude. 

For we are like men "lying awake in the dark" and lis- 
tening, to use Bishop Leighton's beautiful image, in regard 
to many of these questions of the future life. Our minds 
fail us. We cannot straighten out everything. You remem- 
ber William Whewell's quaint line 

" There is no force, however great, 
Can stretch a cord, however fine, 
Into a horizontal line 
That shall be accurately straight." 

And surely, dear brethren, in view of our urgent text, 
may we not say this : It is not so much whether a man's con- 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



23 



jecture inclines this way or that way upon some secondary 
point concerning which little is said in the Scripture, as 
whether the man holds either opinion, whether pro or con, 
as of little moment compared with the tremendous mid-rush 
of Christian motive to win men now and conquer the nations 
for Christ before the firing of the sunset gun, which shall 
determine the fitness of a man to be Christ's missionary. 

II. As to the movement of what we call the indus- 
trial enterprise of our time by the aid of applied science. 
The missionary sustains a similar attitude of glad welcome 
and acceptance of these novel and brilliant energies as allies 
to the spread of the gospel, but only so far as they are kept 
subordinate to the end of the spiritual rescue of men. 

As to physical science itself, if genuine, it must be an 
ally not an enemy to a religion whose gracious hammock is 
swung between the two towers of the incarnation and the 
resurrection. At these two critical points of doctrine, where 
honor to physical nature blends with faith in God, the com- 
ing age is to reveal, I believe, a profound community of 
ground between our scientific friends and ourselves ; and 
then, too, the instruments which science has given to enter- 
prise — the engine, the press, the telephone, in whose mys- 
terious echoes speech repeats itself a thousand miles away 
— all these spreading in the wake of commerce over the 
world not only break up the stubborn masses of heathen 
custom but add agencies of incalculable power to the service 
of the gospel itself. 

Business sagacity also, executive skill, inventive genius, 
the alert, combining, creative mind, are both welcomed and 
developed in the missionary arena, but all "that we may 
gain" men. Missionary enthusiasm may "adapt" itself to a 
business age, and, brethren, suffer me to say that the best 
adaptation to a business age is a great advance in giving. 
We hear of " retrenchment." The very stones of the mis- 
sions cry against this enforced retrenchment. 

Read the "Cry from the Missions" the most terribly 
eloquent document ever laid before our anniversaries. Let 



24 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



us heed that cry. " Reducing contributions" is drawing 
missionary blood. 

In reference to one great field of missionary effort, 
hitherto the most impenetrable, perhaps, and obdurate of 
all — the field of the Moslem — might we not hazard the 
conjecture that perhaps the application of science to enter- 
prise — or, in a word, machinery — is destined to be the most 
effective possible ally to the Christian faith, for machinery is 
the embodied victory of mind over matter, or, to put it in 
another way, of will over fate, and Mohammedanism is fatal- 
ism. Machinery is the natural antithesis of Mohammedanism. 

Mr. Edward Sell, writing in the last August Contempo- 
rary of the "New Islam," approves the effort of certain 
younger Moslem scholars to bring Islam into accord with 
the progressive tendencies of the times. The attempt will 
be futile. When some years ago in Cairo I visited the great 
Mosque of El-Lazar, where thousands of Arab students are 
taught the Koran, and saw these boys and youth seated in 
little groups on the broad floor of the Mosque, each one 
swinging his body backward and forward as he again and 
again rehearsed the passage in a vacant and mindless recita- 
tive, I said : This is not a religion ; it is a mental despotism, 
almost a monomania. It is the paralysis of a fatalistic creed, 
as if physically forced upon the very fiber and function of 
the brain. "Fixed, from the very outset," says Dr. Kuenen, 
"this is the character of Islam." 

Now, machinery in an instant shatters this rigid code, 
for progress begins with a blow struck back at fate, and 
machinery is the triumph of such a blow. 

But a higher and still more apposite instance is at hand 
of this legitimate adaptation of modern missions to the 
scientific environment, where the adaptation is plainly the 
product (as it is my main purpose tonight to argue) — the 
product of the great Christian thought of rescue. We find 
this instance under the flag of our own Board in the figure 
of the missionary physician — for the crown and bloom of 
modern applied science is in the field of medicine ; and one 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



25 



of the peculiar glories of modern Protestant missions, and of 
this American Board, is the educated missionary physician. 

Never the church without the school, we have said. 
Never either without the hospital. "The church and the 
hospital must come together to the Orient," said Dr. Post to 
me in the operating room of the great and noble hospital 
at Beirut. 

I love to think of the missionary physician, and for what 
he stands today — one of the most magnificent products of 
these centuries. On the scientific side he in his profession 
of medicine occupies that wonderful focal point whither all 
the bright paths of modern physics and scientific discovery 
converge — the Square of Saint Mark's in the Venice of 
Science — and he stands there in Christ's name. Reading 
the human frame beneath this searching and splendid illumi- 
nation, knowing its laws and its perils, and treating its 
diseases as a way of Christian approach to the man him- 
self, he embodies the very genius of the scientific age in 
its noblest field of practical operation, while yet he is not 
in the least thereby chilled in his errand of winning men 
to Christ ; on the contrary, it is the spirit of the cross 
which has produced him and placed him where he is. Be- 
coming man's physician, he ceases not to be Christ's mis- 
sionary. Along a channel cleared, not clogged, by scientific 
enthusiasm, pours the old Christian passion to "save," and 
he stands forth by the side of his preaching brother, sharing 
with him in the one royal and overmastering ardor to "pre- 
sent every man perfect in Christ Jesus." 

III. Only a word can be said upon the third great 
new force of our time, though it deserves many. 

" We are living in the sociological age of the world," 
writes Dr. Josiah Strong in his recent and most stirring- 
book, The New Era. Indeed, the question now is not one 
even of democracy but of a new democracy. To the de- 
mocracy of individualism, with which we are familiar, has 
succeeded a subtle and powerful rival — the democracy of 



26 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



socialism — and around this distinction rages a cyclone of 
discussion and dissension. 

The agitation of these theories is beginning to affect 
some of our most important missionary fields, while here at 
home, in this drift towards social cooperation and represent- 
ative control, we come upon what is a living question for us 
in this Board — the question between a corporate nucleus 
and an outlying popular constituency. 

But on this field, also, the missionary spirit stands with 
a discriminating sympathy, and here, as everywhere, the guide 
to the true adjustment is to be found in the same freshened 
sense of the breadth and depth and holy splendor of our mis- 
sionary errand, while on the field the true missionary finds 
in the instant wrestle to save men in Christ the source of 
the true social enthusiasm. The true missionary will never 
repeat that error of "too much politics" which characterized 
the Latin missions of the sixteenth century in India and 
Japan. He does not meddle with the civic relations of gov- 
ernments to their subjects, and yet, as representing the fel- 
lowship of Christ, he is in sympathy with the people and 
with popular liberty. He does not approve that " dropping 
down deadness " of manner which, you remember, Sidney 
Smith said some bishops liked in their clergy, and which 
despots desire in their subjects. On the other hand, how- 
ever, he stands for order and for law, for good manners and 
social refinement, and for the finished results of accumulated 
resources and a stable civilization. His sense of human 
brotherhood in Christ attracts him to what is true in the 
new democratic and social ideals, while at the same time his 
sense of the separate beauty and value of each individual 
soul guards him against their false and fantastic extremes. 

Thus the missionary becomes a social mediator between 
extremes of opinion, and from his lonely and critical and 
often perilous field of toil, in his balance of judgment and 
breadth of sympathy, he voices this final maxim of the nobler 
democracy, " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be 
called the children of God." May it not even be true that 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



2 7 



just as in applied science and in machinery we find the 
natural ally of the cross against the crescent, so in the mod- 
ern spirit of popular liberty and social cooperation we are 
to find the natural ally of the cross against caste, which is 
the practical fastness of the ancient superstitions of India. 
The local franchise and experiments in social cooperation 
are true correlatives of that blessed gospel before which, 
thus supported and recommended, the subtle sorcery of 
caste must dissolve and disappear. 

IV. Last of all, we meet one of the most remarkable 
movements of our age in the call for a larger and wider 
philanthropy. Stirring among the noble-hearted sons and 
daughters of our times, of every class and special creed, in 
England, Sweden, Germany, America, we observe the spirit 
of a new philanthropy, whose specific note is the scientific 
analysis of social conditions as the prerequisite to a wise 
effort to relieve them. Within a dozen years a new litera- 
ture, almost, has arisen in order to expound this new move- 
ment of humanitarian reform, to state its problems, record 
its experiments, and tabulate its results. 

But surely no argument is needed to show that as a 
Christian missionary realizes the breadth and beauty of his 
own errand and enters into the spirit of the cross, in that 
proportion he comes into touch with this philanthropic move- 
ment, also, in its very finest form ; for the spirit of Christ is 
not that of a blind self-sacrifice, but is that of intelligent as 
well as sacrificial service to the whole man, body and soul. 

The true genesis of philanthropy in its connection with 
religious faith is well given in the words of Florence Night- 
ingale : " If I could give you any information of my life," 
she says, " it would be to show how a woman of very ordi- 
nary ability has been led by God, in strange and unaccus- 
tomed paths, to do, hi his service, what he has done in her." 
These words of the heroine of the Crimea sound like an 
echo of Saint Paul, where he says, "To reveal his Son in 
me that I might preach him among the Gentiles." 

The word philanthropy, then, is only a Greek name for 



2S 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



one side of missionary effort. It is only a milestone on the 
road out to where Saint Paul, that strange and fiery scholar, 
stands, burning with a passion of rescue, listening at night 
across the yEgean to the cry for help from Macedon, and 
exclaiming, as the keynote of all his many-toned ministry, 
"That I might gain," " That I might by all means save." 

The new philanthropy is only a part of that splendid and 
supreme conception of saving a man to Christ and in Christ, 
which, whether on the old Asian shore or in the heat and 
rush of today, is the divine glory of life. 

Riding at nightfall, some years ago, through the long, 
dim archway that leads into the ruins of the great temple 
at Baalbec, an old Scotchman of our party missed his way 
and struck heavily against a projecting beam or fragment of 
rock. He was thrown from his horse, and lay stunned and 
bleeding. No adequate medical aid was at hand. We did 
for him what we could, and after he had recovered con- 
sciousness we bound up in a rude way his wounds, which 
were serious, and next morning we placed the pale and suf- 
fering old man in a palanquin and set out to carry him over 
the mountains to Beirut. It was a weary march. As we 
crossed the plain and came under the foot-hills of the Leb- 
anon Mountains I saw a horseman far above us, riding 
straight toward us down the steep mountain side. I thought 
at first he must be a man of the desert, so daringly and mag- 
nificently he rode, his horse leaping down from point to 
point and falling upon our little caravan almost like a bolt 
out of the heavens. But he raised his cap and spoke in 
English. "I hear you have had an accident," said he, "for 
bad news travels fast across the plain. I am Dale, of Zahleh" 
— a name now starred in the glorious annals of American 
missionaries and of the Syrian mission — " and I rode down 
the mountain to tell you to bring the injured gentleman 
straight up to my house in the mission at Zahleh on the hill. 
We will take care of him, and have a doctor out from Beirut 
to attend him, and when he is able set him on his way." 

I looked at the speaker and thought I was in sight of 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



29 



something higher and whiter than the snow summits of Leb- 
anon. Gerald Dale, of Zahleh ! I see him now as I saw him 
then, his cap off, his hair tossed back, his eye flashing with 
the daring of his precipitous ride, his splendid horse all in a 
foam — the light of the morning flaming across the fine, 
chiseled face, the very incarnation of Christian chivalry and 
philanthropy — Christ's true knight, promptly and wisely of- 
fering the best he had to a suffering stranger in manhood's 
and Christ's name. 

Brethren, I have spoken too long, and yet not long 
enough unless I have been able to throw into relief this 
simple idea that a Christian mission today may and should 
adapt itself to the freshest and strongest forces of the times 
we live in, but that the missionary spirit itself, a certain 
living and loving earnestness to gain men in Christ, is the 
true source of breadth and felicity of method in accomplish- 
ing this adaptation. 

We are in the whirl of a tremendous epoch. If mission- 
ary enterprise is to adapt itself to this epoch it must be not 
by devices and compromises and subtleties of policy, but by 
the deep reenforcement of the old Pauline ardor to save men 
in Christ. Only the eternal love of the cross can produce 
the true genius of adaptation in winning men — the quick 
apprehension, the fine responsiveness, the spontaneous grace 
of address, and in policy the large yet safe measures of true 
progress. 

As to these four great features in the life of our time — 
the spirit of intellectual freedom and rational criticism, the 
spirit of science and its application to industrial enterprise, 
the spirit of a representative and social democracy, the spirit 
of humanitarian reform — I must believe that our Christian 
missions may meet them and, in a sense, may incorporate 
them all. 

But, O brethren, what a fervent heat at the center is 
requisite to balance the dispersive tendencies of such broad 
adaptations and maintain the one end of saving men in 
Christ regnant to the outermost tip and filament of all 



3^ 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



this immense array of novel and brilliant relations and 
agencies. 

Only a passion to save can make the end to master the 
method in such a time as this, but such a passion is attain- 
able, and the way to attain it is surely evermore the same 
old way — draw closer to God and closer to man, or, in one 
word, draw closer to Christ, who is both God and man. 

The attitude of the missionary or the missionary sup- 
porter resembles that of the orchestral performer, who in 
one quick, infallible second glances from the midst of the 
intricate score to the beat of the baton of his leader ; so, in 
the midst of the bewildering score of the modern age, the 
true man of missions fixes his eye upon Christ and upon 
Christ's errand to save, and in the thrilling supremacy of that 
one idea he finds the key to a practical answer in all ques- 
tions of detail. 

I confess, honored brethren, that I have thus construed 
your demand upon me at the present moment, that, in view of 
all the critical considerations of the hour, the fittest service 
I might render would not be to attempt to pursue any side- 
track of special discussion, still less to seek any novelties of 
address, but simply to invoke afresh the old splendor of the 
missionary enthusiasm ; for it surely is the true solvent of all 
difficulties, the true guide to wise and happy adjustments. 
To realize it anew, in all its ancient fervor, will surely, more 
than anything else, exalt this anniversary, give harmony to 
its counsels and practical force to its decisions, making it a 
blessing to our churches throughout the land and to our 
mission stations throughout the world. 

I invoke, then, in Christ's name, on this occasion, in 
closing, the missionary spirit. Springing from the depths 
of the great incarnation it enters, as Christ himself enters, 
into the souls of his disciples, becoming there a passion for 
rescue in his name. Unlike the proselytizing zeal of other 
religions, it seeks not to capture the man but to renew him. 
It sees man in Christ and Christ in man, whom it at once 
honors and pities and yearns over with that strange donum 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



3' 



lachrymarum — that "gift of tears" — of which the old 
Fathers speak. As in a kind of glowing and unworldly 
vision, it realizes at once the love of God, the worth of man, 
the woe of sin, the nameless power and pathos of the cross, 
and it rushes forth with a lover's heart and a hero's will 
to bring the cross to the sin — the Saviour to the man. 

In this rush to save all lesser things take lower places. 
Difficulties are as nothing. Oceans, deserts, are crossed ; 
jungles are pierced ; obscure dialects are mastered. Dangers 
do not daunt, nor long delays exhaust, nor even failures chill 
this missionary ardor. It sings in the music of the immor- 
tal lands. It can receive a blow with a smile, and it gazes 
with a strange eagerness into every human face in order to 
detect there, beneath whatever degradation, the latent glory 
of the soul, and establish there the. new similitude of the 
Lord. It is at once devoted and daring. Its spokesman is 
Paul, who is the father of the chivalric in Christian missions, 
to whom nothing is quite Christian unless it stirs the blood, 
whose words leap and tingle. 

"I go bound in spirit," he cries ; " I am debtor to Greek 
and barbarian ; " " I am an ambassador in bonds ; " "I am 
in travail until Christ be formed in you ; " and, with a still 
more unmeasured intensity, " I could wish myself accursed 
from Christ for my brethren." 

We rejoice in Keswick conventions and summer Bible 
readings, and, on the other hand, we rejoice in the critical 
discussions of true scholars concerning the Scriptures. The 
cult of holiness and the search after truth are noble things, 
and the light on the brow of both saint and scholar is lovely 
to see ; but must not all issue in this one tremendous note of 
practical wrestle to save ? 

Down there on the wet sand with the life-boat is the place 
for a Christian, and nothing so touches the very missionary 
marrow as that low cry through the lips of the veteran Paul, 
" I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for 
my brethren." 

Let this, then, be the constant refrain of our anniversary, 



3- 



THE GAINING OF MEN. 



" That I might gain," "That I might gain/' "That I might 
by all means save." Our debates about method will then 
be like the earnest conference of a rescue party hurrying to 
the relief of imperiled men, for otherwise we lose the per- 
spective of all discussion, unless w r e repeat at every interval 
Paul's great cry. 

If, then, we are conservative, let us be so " that we may 
gain;" if liberal, let us be so "that we may gain." In the 
thought of the man yonder, and the Christ yonder, we grasp 
hands, and we shall go back to our churches with a spirit 
that shall make that ideal million a year for foreign missions 
a solid actuality even in hard times, and that vision of a score 
of new men from our seminaries for the foreign field an im- 
mediate and blessed fact. 

We shall relight every torch. We shall find the true 
method in realizing the true end of missionary enterprise, 
and, best of all, this beloved Missionary Board not only will 
continue to be, but will become even afresh the channel of 
a divine energy, the humble bearer into all the earth of a 
holy power — a power real as Orion, intimate as motherhood, 
overmastering as the sea — the power of Christ to save. 



